Book Review: "The Demon Overlord's retirement plan" by M. H. Foster

"What do you do when after 444 lifetimes of grinding the faces of the poor, despoiling civilisation, fighting and killing heroes, you find that being the epitome of evil has become ... boring? 

Is there a way for a lord of evil to actually - retire?" 

This is the story of how an evil Demon ruler took the path of Cincinnatus.






















"The Demon Overlord's retirement plan" by MH Foster is one of the funniest science fiction or fantasy novels I've read in the past year or two. It's up there with the best of the "Dumb luck and dead heroes" books by Skyler Ramirez.

This is the first part of a trilogy called "A Gentle Apocalypse" which consists of

1) "The Demon Overlord's retirement plan"  (October 2025, available from Amazon at

Demon Overlord's Retirement Plan (A Gentle Apocalypse) : Foster, M. H.: Amazon.co.uk: Books)

2) "Love, Politics, and Other Acts of War"  (January 2026, available at

 Love, Politics, and Other Acts of War (A Gentle Apocalypse) : Foster, M. H.: Amazon.co.uk: Books)

3) "Band of others"  (Due for publication on 14th April 2026, can be pre-ordered at:

Band of Others (A Gentle Apocalypse Book 3) eBook : Foster, M. H.: Amazon.co.uk: Kindle Store)


The story is set in a realm called Asteria, where for twelve millennia there has raged a conflict between the forces of good, represented by the "Hero of Ages" and the epitome of evil, Galornus Prime, the Demon Overlord.

For four hundred and forty-four lifetimes Galornus has fought against successive incarnations of the Hero. But when he wins, the Divine always brings back a new incarnation of the Hero: and when the hero kills him, Garlornus Prime is always reborn in Hellfire.

And he's fed up with it.

So he's going to do the last thing anyone would expect: he'll become the Demon equivalent of Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus, retire to a farm in the countryside and grow vegetables.

At first his plan seems to have worked brilliantly. He settles in the village of Lower Middleton, which is basically a magical fantasy world's version of a cross between St Mary Mead from Agatha Christie's "Miss Marple" stories, Ambridge from "The Archers," or Walton's Mountain. He buys a plot of land and a goat, starts to raise Turnips, and settles down to looking as inconspicuous as possible.

But settling down to keep out of politics turns out not to be quite as easy as he expected.


The writing is brilliantly funny. I laughed out loud for the first time a couple of paragraphs into the prologue when Galornus Prime explains that he thinks of battles to the death with the hero of Ages as "performance reviews" and kept on laughing as the language gradually changes so slowly that you hardly notice from completely cynical and worldly detachment to something quite different, but still full of humour.


A joy from start to finish. I recommend this one.


 Mitth'raw'nuruodo


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Book Series overview: David Weber's "Honor Harrington" universe book reviews.

This page is an index page and overview for all the books of the "Honor Harrington" science fiction universe, or the "Honorverse." It will be updated as new Honorverse books are published and the plan is to put up reviews for all 40+ books in the series, which will be linked to here. This is a set of military and espionage science fiction, currently as of December 2025 containing more than forty books, set in a future universe in which mankind began to dispersed over much of the galaxy, starting in 2103 AD. The main stories are set about two thousand years in the future, with two prequel series set about 400 years before, in what by our calendar will be the thirty-seventh century (the earliest book in the first Prequel series, "A beautiful Friendship," is set 1518 years after the diaspora, or in 3621 AD/CE.) The series has sometimes been described as "Ms Hornblower in space" because they contain some very strong and obviously intentional similari...
Read more

Book review - "Powerless" by Harry Turtledove

"Powerless" by Harry Turtledove is an alternative history novel set in a world dominated by the Soviet Union. The first two chapters of this full-length novel originally appeared in slightly different form in the September/October 2018 issue of " The magazine of Fantasy and Science Fictio n."  Greg Benford suggested to Harry Turtledove that he extended it into a novel and this is the result. Like the majority of Turtledove's alternative history novels, the story in this book operates on two levels. On the surface level, it is a work of fiction set on an alternative version of Earth. On a deeper level, it is an account of a real-world series of historical events told from an alternative perspective. The world of "Powerless" begins to diverge from our own with the Confederate States of America successfully winning independence in the 1860's. By the time in which the novel is set, many years later - and we are never told exactly how much later - the a...
Read more